Chapter IV: Part 4

With the instinctive, gentlemanlike reserve of the Western frontiersman, he never questioned me about myself; he was far more interested in what knowledge I might have gathered, which he could add to his own. Oddly enough, it was the little reading that I had done in philosophy that seemed to attract him most. Many a night when it was mild enough to sleep with our heads uncovered we lay side by side, “overarched by gorgeous night,” gazing into the starry firmament, and I would tell him what I could of theories of the universe from Thales to Herbert Spencer, feeling all the while the tension of his mind as he reached out eagerly for these guesses at the mystery of things.

It happened that I had been reading “Coningsby,” at Creede, and Prince slipped the copy into his pocket as we left the camp. He devoured it by our camp-fires at night. The story held him, but most of all he was spellbound by its literary charm, and he added a quaint reason for his liking in the remark:

“You know,” he said to me, “Lord Beaconsfield was always square with the Irish.”

His national partisanship was of the stanchest, and he had always given to the Irish fund when he could; but the outcome of the fight in Committee Boom No. 15 had been too much for him, and he would stoutly maintain that never again, so long as the “traitors” who had turned against Parnell were in the ascendant, would he interest himself in furthering Home Rule—threads of vital connection which were a little strange, I thought, between points so widely severed as St. Stephen’s and the deserts of Arizona.

Elsewhere I have already sketched in outline our trip as we walked south together from Durango to the San Juan, then through the Navajo Reservation to the high plateau of northern New Mexico, where, utterly deserted by fair weather, we camped for a week, while a cold wave swept over us, forcing the thermometer down to ten and twelve degrees below zero, and nearly freezing us and our animals in the still cold of the winter nights.

Even after we got under way again and were making progress southward in the direction of the “rimrock” of the Mogollon Mountains, persistent ill-luck followed us in the shape of almost nightly falls of snow and rain, which added nothing to the comfort of sleeping on the ground or walking across an almost trackless waste. But if we were disappointed here, Price’s promise of Indian summer was abundantly fulfilled when once we had waded through the snow in the great primeval forests that cover the northern slopes of the Mogollons, and made the abrupt descent of the “rimrock.” It was like the contrast of Florida with our Northern winter. The live-oak and budding cottonwood and the warm sun and sprouting grass gave us royal welcome from the cold and snow beyond; and, at the end of the first day’s journey in this region, we came out upon a ranch. It was thirty miles to the nearest neighbor, and the ranchman and his wife were glad to see anyone, even casual “burro-punchers,” like Price and me. There chanced to be a considerable company at the ranch that night. An outfit of three men who were hunting mountain lion through the range for the sake of the bounty on their scalps had come there to camp, bringing with them the carcass of a bear. And the postman, whose beat took him from the Santa Fé line southward through some Mormon settlements and on to scattered ranches north of the Tonto Basin, was also quartered there. So that we sat down more than a dozen strong to dine on bear steak and potatoes and bread and coffee; and when dinner was over, Price and I again had the good fortune to find that our tobacco suited well the taste of the company. We were gathered now in the living-room of the cabin. Some of the men were seated on the floor and others in rough, hand-made chairs about a wood fire in a large, open fireplace. The talk ranged at random over phases of hard living known to such men as these. It was varied and rich and sometimes racy. In it Price shone as a bright, particular star. None had travelled the Southwest so thoroughly as he, or experienced so much of its characteristic life. Then his native readiness at narrative stood him in good stead, and, penniless prospector that he was, he held unchallenged the centre of the stage.

The door of the dining-room stood open, and, when I had finished my pipe, I joined the ranchman’s wife, who sat beside the table in a rocking-chair, holding in her arms her oldest child, a boy of five or six. She seemed glad to have someone to talk to. The conversation at table had swept from end to end in a manner diverting to her, but in which she as little dreamed of joining as a bird would venture with untried wings into a high wind. She was too delicately reared to be at home in the thickening tobacco-smoke of the living-room and so she was alone with the child, the hired woman being in the kitchen. I praised the country side which she and her husband had chosen as their home, and told her how well it contrasted with a region only a few miles to the north; but, if I found a way to her heart at all, it was in genuine admiration of the boy, whose light hair rested in moist curls about his glowing face, as he lay sleeping in his mother’s arms. She was not a discontented woman—far from it; she was young, and her eyes shone with health and with vital interest in the things about her. But it was rarely that she saw anyone from the world outside, and I was a stranger, and when I owned to having been in the Northwest, she told me eagerly that her own people and her husband’s lived “back east in Minnesota,” where they both were born and bred.

How can I suggest the pathos of it? She was not complaining and yet, as she went on telling me of an earlier time, it was almost as a captive might have spoken of the wide range of living when he was free. Life in constant contact with her friends and the breadth of their many interests was in such striking contrast to existence on a ranch, with the nearest neighbor thirty miles in the offing, and with never a look from year to year over the rugged hills that formed the horizon.

One could see at a glance the opposite effects of the change upon the two natures. Her husband, native-born and country-bred, like herself, and schooled as a man must be whose bringing up is in a community which draws its blood and traditions pure from New England, yet had become more a frontiersman every year, in whom the memories of earlier things faded fast before the dominant realities of his new surroundings. She, on the contrary, cherished these memories of her own—her home and friends and church associations and Chautauqua circle (she told me particularly of that) until they were enshrined within her, and one could but see that, however loneliness might oppress her, she had an escape which must have furnished at times an enjoyment keener, perhaps, than any which real experience would have brought.

I have forgotten its name, but I think that it was known as “Young’s Valley,” a region some distance south of the “rimrock” and north of the hills which hem in the Tonto Basin. There were several ranches there, and a well-defined trail led on, by way of San Reno Pass, to Phœnix. When we entered the valley Price was all for veering off to the southwest and reaching Phœnix by the Natural Bridge, which he wished me to see. We left the trail near the first cabin which we passed in the valley, a deserted cabin for the time, and struck across the grass-grown hills in search of another way. Soon we were in a maze of trails; they were leading in every direction, but they were cattle-paths, and we came upon herds feeding over the winter-brown hills. It was a gently rolling country at the first, where Price had not the smallest difficulty in steering a course; for, although he had never been there before, yet the way had been described to him and he had no fear of losing it. Our only danger lay, apparently, in exhausting our provisions before reaching an inhabited region beyond. But we thought little of that, and entered light-heartedly enough upon an exploration that was new and attractive to us both.

Trouble began with the weakening of our burros. We had very little grain when we left the Tonto trail, and we counted upon fodder enough from a grazing country. But the grass grew thinner as we went, and the leanness of the cattle attested the leanness of the land, until we began to fear that our beasts would not have strength enough to pull through. Moreover, the country became increasingly rough, so that the effort of travel was the greater. Soon there came a day when our animals were weak and tottering under their loads, and we ourselves had to begin the march on a breakfast of tea and a few boiled beans, which exhausted our store. Still Price was confident of getting through, and, if the burros could hold out, there was prospect of plenty by night.

In the middle of the morning we found lying beside the trail a cow that was plainly dying. For an hour we worked over her, trying to discover evidences of a wound or of a broken leg, and trying, too, to ease her pain. I left her alive regretfully, but Price advised against shooting her.

Matters grew serious that afternoon. The trail became hopelessly lost, so that not even Price, with his developed instinct, could find it again. We were in the heart of the hills now, with cañons opening in strange confusion about us. One after another we explored them, only to find each a “box-cañon” at the end. Price was sure that our desired country lay just beyond, and it was maddening, late in the day, to acknowledge that he could find no way out but the one by which we entered. It was a sorry retreat; hungry and worn we went supperless into camp. By rare good luck, however, we hit upon camping-ground where there was more grass than we had seen for some time, and in the morning our burros and the pony were comparatively revived, fit again for a hard journey. And we gave it them.

Price and I had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, and very little then. Meanwhile we had been working hard in keen mountain air, and I was so hungry by the time that we got back to the cow, now dead beside the trail, that I proposed our eating some of her. Price quickly put an end to the plan, however, not on hygienic grounds, but by explaining that the cattlemen, if they found her mutilated, would conclude that she had been killed, and would make matters lively for us in consequence, hanging being the not uncommon penalty for this offence.

One does not keep close count of days in wandering over a frontier, and it was only an aggravation of our plight to remember that it was not Sunday merely but Christmas-day as well. But if Christmas heightened the sense of hardship, it furnished an admirable setting to its end. By trusting his instinct for a short cut, Price brought us out in the middle of the afternoon upon open hills, from which we not only saw a section of Young’s Valley, but, rising clear from the middle of it, a column of blue smoke from the chimney of a ranchman’s cabin. We wasted no time in covering the intervening miles and then we lifted, light-heartedly, the latch of the road-gate and, with the easy assurance of the frontier, drove our animals into the yard beside the corral. For some reason we had not been seen from the cabin, so Price walked on to the door, while I mounted guard over the burros. From a seat in the sun on an old hen-coop I could watch them as they nibbled the short grass, while from the cabin came peals of laughter, denoting that Price had fallen among friends who were keeping Christmas festival.

I was willing enough to rest outside, knowing that we had reached a hospitable roof and that a dinner was assured. Sitting there for some time, I presently began to question what was keeping Price, when the cabin-door opened and two women appeared. As they walked down the footpath to the gate, I gathered that they were neighbors returning from a Christmas call. But this was the least interesting inference, and I was totally at a loss for others. The wonder grew as they came nearer. They were young and faultlessly dressed, and one of them was beautiful. Their dress was of the kind that charms with its perfect simplicity and the air of natural distinction with which it is worn. They rested frank eyes on me for a moment as they passed and nodded pleasantly, speaking their thanks with sweet voices, as I stood holding open the gate. Who they were remained a mystery, and I was content to have it so, for they left me not without a sense of Christmas visitation, which stirred again the memories of my own “God’s country.”

The ranchman was a Virginian, tall, fair-eyed, and soft of speech, and when he and Price came out together they were stanch friends on the strength of an earlier acquaintance, and we had the freedom of the ranch. We unpacked and corralled the animals and then made ready for dinner. Not for two days had we tasted food, and now we were seated with our host and hostess and their two sons at a table which groaned under sweet potatoes and roast corn and piles of bread and great dishes full of steaming “hog and hominy,” and with it all, the best of Christmas cheer. For two days we stayed at the Virginian’s ranch and then, having purchased from him a fresh store of food, we resumed the march by way of the Tonto Basin and Fort McDowell to Phœnix.

On New-year’s-day we were camped at Fort McDowell; and, when we set out early on the next morning, there remained but about thirty miles to Phœnix, so we resolved to cover it in a single march. Night found us still some miles from the city, but the night was clear and flooded with moonlight. The moon made plain the way, yet played fantastically over the face of the country. Long reaches of white sand were converted into Arabian deserts, with pilgrim caravans moving across them; the irrigated ranches were transformed into tropical gardens, whose luxuriance was heightened by the exquisite softness of the night, and then there were stretches of uncompromising Arizona desert, dusty and cactus-grown and redolent of alkali.

It was nearing midnight when we entered the town. Price directed the way to a corral where he was known, and where we left the animals feasting on fresh alfalfa, while we fared forth to see his friends. It was precisely as though Price had invited me around to his club. He led the way to a saloon, and as we entered it, I saw at once its typical character. At the left of the entrance was a bar, gorgeous with mirrors and cut glass, while down the deep recesses of the room were faro and roulette tables and tables for poker. The groups about them were formed of “cow-punchers,” and prospectors and “Greasers” and Chinamen, and even Indians, all mingling and intermingling with a freedom that suggested that in gambling there is a touch of nature that makes the whole world kin.

But more immediately interesting to us was a group which stood beside the bar. It was made up, as I found, of politicians, high in territorial office, all of whom knew Price and hailed him cordially while asking after his luck. For some time we stood talking with them, then one of their number, himself not a politician but a business man, proposed our joining him at supper. We accepted, I the more delightedly because he, of all the group, had most attracted me. Tall and very handsome, he had the bearing of a gentleman, and what he told me of himself confirmed my own impression of a richly varied past. Far into the night we talked, and I could well believe him when he said that the fascination of the life which he had led on the frontier had so far grown upon him that, while he was glad to go back at times to his former home in New York, he could no longer remain contented there, hearing as he always did after a few months, at most, the call back to the wild freedom of the plains. It was under the spell of what he said, enforced by my little experience as a “burro-puncher,” that I went to sleep that night on a bed of alfalfa in the corral; and when I wakened in the morning and found letters urging my return to the East, I was conscious of an indifference to the idea which was wholly new to my experience.

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INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS

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INCIDENTS OF THE SLUMS

If anything is wanting to darken the picture of life in city slums, it is a sense of the needlessness of much of the suffering. And this is the sense which I cannot escape in looking back upon a winter in Chicago, from the vantage point of nearly a year of walking and working through regions west of that city. I left Chicago in May of 1892, and entered San Francisco in February of the following year, having gone on foot, in the meantime, through Illinois and southern Minnesota and western Iowa, and almost from end to end of Nebraska and Colorado and through some of New Mexico and much of Arizona and California. It was not in the character of a tramp, but as a wage-earner, that I made the journey; and the only notable fact about it was that I not only never lacked for labor, but I almost never had to ask for it, having scores of opportunities of work pressed upon me by employers hard up for hands. I am well aware of the abnormal in my experiment and of its little worth apart from the value of experience to myself, and I know how slight a connection with the deeper causes which give rise to congestion in labor centres the fact of ready employment in the country may have. Yet, as one result of personal contact, I cannot help seeing much of the misery of the mass in the light of individuals suffering wretchedly for want of knowledge of a better chance.

We speak in old-fashioned phrase of a city’s slums as though they were a local evil in the town, quite remote in connection with the rest of the corporate whole, while in truth we know, in our haunting, new-found knowledge of social solidarity, that they form a sore which denotes disease in every part of the body politic. The conviction grows upon us that it is often at the cost of much suffering to our kind that we have food to eat and raiment to put on, and the immunity from personal responsibility which once we felt in paying high prices for our wares is fast being undermined by increased acquaintance with the ramifications of the “sweating system.” Indeed, we seem to see that, from the very frame of things, if one enjoys, another suffers, and that the unwitting oppressors of the poor are often the poor themselves, while the destruction of the poor is their poverty. Men tell us that things were growing worse, and that hope lies that way, because it points to ultimate dissolution and a new order. I find it impossible to share this form of optimism, and I cannot see that things are really getting worse, but rather incomparably better as measured, for example, by the standard of the last century of industrial progress. And so far from seeing hope in a belief that matters are getting worse, I find it rather in the view that much that is worst in modern life is fast becoming intolerable in a society which grows increasingly conscious of vital interdependence and relationship. Meanwhile the concrete facts remain, and here is a glimpse of some of them as they appear in a partial record of fragments of two days’ experience in Chicago.

I was working as a hand-truckman in a factory far out on Blue Island Avenue. My wages were $1.50 a day, and I was paying for board and lodging, in a tenement across the way, $4.25 a week. As one result, I was saving money and would soon be able to leave the job and write up my notes, while widening my acquaintance with the town before looking for other work. Already I had a little knowledge of the city. For two weeks after entering it I had been among its unemployed and had suffered some and had seen the real suffering among others of my class, before I found occupation in a West-side factory.

It was during those two weeks that I came to know a widow, with whom this tale is first concerned. I met her early in December; it was now nearing the end of January, and we factory hands were marking with delight the lengthening of the days, for we were beginning to have a little daylight left when work was over. At last one afternoon the setting sun came pouring through the kitchen window while we were washing up for supper at Mrs. Schultz’s boarding-house. That was because it was Saturday, and we had quit at five o’clock, being given, as was the custom in the factory, a half hour on Saturday afternoons.

The usual week’s end excitement was running high among the men. Gibes and louder talk than common were rife, as black hands and faces came white from soap and successive basins of hot water. Some of the men were going in the evening to a “show,” others to a “fancy-dress ball,” and a few were saying nothing. We scattered widely after supper, leaving the house to the family, which must have been a welcome change to them, for generally, through the week, we all foregathered in the sitting-room at night and romped with the children and played cards until bed-time.

Mrs. Stone will serve as the widow’s name, and my first errand that evening took me to her home, which was in the basement of a building on Boston Avenue. We were both concerned in pressing a claim which she had upon her husband’s people, a highly just claim, I thought; for he had deserted her some time before his death, leaving her alone in the support of herself and their two children. Why she had ever come to the city, I could never make clearly out, beyond what had seemed to be to her a strong appeal to her reason that, if she must make her own living and the children’s, she could hope to do it better in town than in the country where she was born and bred. And the marvel was that she had succeeded in keeping them all alive. The city had, of course, furnished an awful disillusionment. The children proved an insuperable barrier to employment at domestic service, and, failing to find any other labor, she was rescued finally from starvation by getting a job from a “sweater.” She deserved success, for she was an heroic creature. To hear her describe the struggle, you would gather that hers had been the best of luck. She merely wanted a chance to work, so that they might live; and had she not found it, just when she thought, for lack of it, that they must starve?

From the sweater’s shop she would carry the goods two miles to her home, walking both ways, for she could not afford car-fare. Then all day and through much of the night she made the garments. They were boys’ waists, and the materials, ready cut, besides the necessary thread and buttons, were furnished her. There was left for her to do all the remaining work, down to sewing on the buttons and making the button-holes, and she was paid for the finished waists at the rate of thirty-five cents a dozen.

It was hard, she did admit, to feed and clothe her family and pay the rent on a wage-rate like that, and she was near to going under when another and a crowning stroke of fortune fell. In answer to a notice tacked on her door, two women, who worked in a neighboring book-bindery, applied for board, and each agreed to pay two dollars a week. The five then lived together in the basement-room, whose furniture consisted chiefly of dry-goods boxes, but the boarders took kindly to the home and the children, and things had gone comfortably ever since. Gradually the children, a boy of nine and a girl two years younger, were learning to help at some of the simpler forms of sewing and in the housework.

This, I beg to interpolate, was the small beginning of Mrs. Stone’s success. Haying shrewdness as well as energy, she soon discovered that keeping boarders was more profitable than making waists, and so she developed that side of her enterprise. When I saw her last, in the following May, she was mistress of a well-appointed mechanics’ boarding-house on Milwaukee Avenue, but her troubles had taken new form, for the contamination of the slums had begun to appear in her son, who was fast developing into an incorrigible, and she had sent for me in order to consult about a plan of placing him in a reformatory.

But to return to the February evening, on which I called to talk with Mrs. Stone about a claim upon her husband’s people: I found her at home. One ran little risk of failing to find Mrs. Stone at home, her engagements abroad being confined to trips to the sweater’s shop for materials. I heard the swift clatter of her sewing-machine as I walked down the steps from the filthy pavement to the door of the basement where she lived. The room had always to me an effect of being brilliantly lighted. It was due to the illumination of two large lamps which were kept faultlessly clean and were burning often in the day as well as night, and in part to the general cleanliness of the room, not to mention the cheerfulness which radiated from Mrs. Stone. She turned from her machine as I drew up an empty soap-box and sat down in front of her, and one would have thought, from the contagion of her manner, that she never knew any mood but one of hopeful courage. But she had no time to spare, and when our talk was ended, she turned again to work, while I went over to another corner and chatted with the children and the boarders.

I was waiting for my friend Kovnitz, whom I had asked to meet me there. Kovnitz was himself employed in the same trade as Mrs. Stone, although in quite another branch of it. He was a coatmaker, and had been brought up to work under the sweating system. Much of the value of his acquaintance, apart from my personal liking for him, lay for me in his thorough knowledge of the trade. He was a socialist, and a very ardent one; but his efforts for reform were directed mainly toward effecting organization among the workers of his kind, and with this I warmly sympathized. We were to go together in the evening to a gathering of the cloak-makers, and, when he appeared at Mrs. Stone’s, we lost no time in starting for the meeting-place on the South-side.

One was never at a loss for conversation with Kovnitz, but it was always conversation which had to do with the condition of his class. That was uppermost and foremost in his mind. Other things interested him only as they were related to that. Although a collectivist, he wasted little thought upon a future socialistic state, and he cared little for present concerted political action in his party. The one supreme necessity, in his view, was that all wage-earners should be led to act together as a class, until their predominance in an industrial age is recognized. When once wage-workers are known to be the most powerful as a class, then social institutions will change in accordance with their interests. It was curious to see how this, the central principle of his creed, absorbed him. It was the criterion of all his judgments, and it gave color and meaning to everything he saw. Generally he noticed little of what was about him. The inferno of those city streets at night seemed not to impress him as we passed. All the varied play of life upon them did not divert him from preoccupation in what he was telling me of the work of organization among wage-earners. Once only his attention was drawn off, and even then his habitual cast of thought moulded the new impression. In glancing up, his eyes had fallen upon a building newly occupied as a department store. It was Saturday evening, and, for some reason, the place was still open. Streams of shoppers were entering the doors and pouring from them. More even than by day, the store gave at night an impression of a bee-hive in full activity. The swarming of the crowds within, the lights from a hundred windows, and the brave array of goods formed the outer picture. But Kovnitz said nothing of that.

“There are two men in that store who are as different in general character as men can be,” he remarked to me, as we stood at the curb. “One of them,” he went on, “is a man of scholarly instincts. He is a disciple of Kant, and knows the Kantian philosophy well. Just now he is giving his leisure to reading Goethe. He is an enthusiast in philosophy and literature, and a man of really fine sensibilities. The other chap is a human brute, and looks it. Nothing interests him beyond his business and his dissipations. Both of these men are at the head of departments of ready-made garments in the store, and I know that they both draw salaries of $4,000 a year. They have good business heads, and manage their departments well, but what makes them specially valuable to their employers is the fact that they know thoroughly the sweating system. They keep carefully informed on the condition of the labor market, and the demand for work; and, when the competition is keenest among the sub-contractors and the workers, they know how to pit the bidders against one another, until the tasks are finally let out at the lowest possible figures. Mrs. Stone is making boys’ waists for thirty-five cents a dozen, and there are more than 20,000 sweatshops in Chicago where similar prices prevail, and Chicago is but one of a score of cities in this country where sweating is in vogue.”

Late that night, after the labor meeting, I was passing the store again. I was alone, for Kovnitz had gone home another way. The street lay quiet, and almost deserted through its length, and I could hear the echo of my tread under the glare of electrics. The sound of jangling music came faintly from a long line of almost continuous saloons. There was some movement in front of them which contrasted sharply with the general desertion of the street.

One is rarely at a loss to trace the antecedents of a sharp impression, and I can remember clearly that I was conscious of a man and woman who stood talking in low tones as I passed, and who disappeared that moment into an open passage. The next instant I was keenly alive to them, for I heard the woman scream as though in mortal fear, and turning, I saw the man dragging her violently out upon the pavement. Events followed one another then in quick succession. I was near enough to watch them at close range, and I had the sense of interpreting them as they moved. I saw the instant flash of anger in the face of a young mechanic who stood near, and the first quick thrust of his arm which sent the man reeling from the girl, then the swift onslaught of the two men, and I heard the rain of blows and oaths, and the loud asseverations of the one attacked that he was an officer, while the crowd thickened about them, and the girl pleaded piteously to be loosed from the grasp of someone who held her.

Two officers in uniform came down upon us from opposite quarters, and the fighting gave way to noisy explanations. It developed then that the attack had been made upon an officer in citizens’ clothes who was doing detective duty against street-walkers. But he was wholly to blame for the disturbance, I thought; for he had handled his prisoner with needless violence, and the blow from the mechanic was so obviously the instinctive, chivalrous act of a man who sees a woman ill-treated. Technically, however, he was guilty of “resisting an officer while in the discharge of his duty,” and he must answer for it, so that the group which started for the Harrison Street Station-house was made up of the three officers, the girl, the mechanic, and four or five stragglers, of whom I was one.

It was easy to learn at the station what course the case had taken. Both prisoners were admitted to bail, and bondsmen having been found, they went free that night under a charge to appear before the court on a certain morning of the following week. When the morning came I was on hand too, for by that time I had given up my job in the factory.

I went early, not knowing at what hour the case might come up, and; although there were already many persons seated on the wooden forms, I looked carefully through both of the court-rooms without seeing those in whom my interest lay. Finding a vacant seat in the inner room, I sat there, watching intently the changing groups at the bar. They were made up of the commonest criminals of the town, and it was rare that a novice appeared to disturb the atmosphere of perfect naturalness. Law-breakers they were without question; the magistrate knew them as well as the police, and frequently he spoke to them by familiar names, reminding them of earlier warnings and threatening them with severer penalties for the future. It was a sort of clearing-house, where a certain residuum of habitual criminals was dealt with by a doctrine of averages in an effort to regulate and control the crime inevitable in a great city.

Sitting beside me on the form was a young girl, plainly dressed, with an air of perfect neatness. Her gloved hands lay folded in her lap and in one of them she held a purse. Her mackintosh of dark material was unbuttoned and thrown open, with the cape falling loosely over her arms. It was the trimness of her hair and a certain trig simplicity in her hat which struck me first, and, when she spoke, the tone and manner were in keeping with her quietness of dress.

“Will you tell me, please, what time it is?” she asked, and, having learned the hour, “What are _you_ up for?” she continued, abruptly.

There was nothing about her which had in the least prepared me for the question, and I floundered about in an explanation that I was there merely out of interest in a case which I expected to come up in the course of the morning.

She smiled wearily at that, regarding me with eyes which asked whether I knew how young I was and how dreary that sort of thing made her feel. I was afraid that I had cut short the conversation and was delighted when she continued, quite simply:

“_I’m_ up for shop-lifting. It was at Walker’s, and it was the hardest luck, for I had everything well concealed. But they suspected me, and, when they brought me here, the matron searched me and soon found the goods. And there I was, red-handed! Now I’m trying to think up some story, but the judge knows me and he warned me well last time.”

It was charming then, for we fell to talking as though we had known each other long. Her small gray eyes that looked straight into mine were as frank and innocent as a child’s. There was little beauty but an entire composure in the lines of her face, heightened by a natural pallor very becoming to her. Her features betrayed no nervousness, and one saw the change of feeling only in her eyes and in a subtle quality in her smile which was expressive and sometimes sweet.

We were two children, who had met by chance, and, sitting there in the dingy light of a station-house court-room, we were presently unaware of anything but the fact that we had a great deal to tell each other. I told her of the mechanic and the girl, and she half believed me, and, in turn, began to tell me of herself. There was no system in her story, only a simple sequence of spontaneity that charmed me. I had but to listen and watch her inscrutable face and ask questions where my dull intuitions were at fault. In the foreground was the incident of shop-lifting, and running from that was a chain of events which led back inevitably into the distant perspective of memory. She had never an air of giving me her confidence, rather of speaking freely as man to man.

It was bad to be caught at shop-lifting, and the more annoying because she had so often carried it off with success. At the best, shop-lifting was a wretched business, entailing much anxiety both in getting and disposing of the goods. But there was the stubborn fact that one must live. Of course she had worked as a shop-girl earning $3.50 a week. And here she began to count up on her fingers the items of bare subsistence with their cost, and the smile with which she concluded was touched with the question, “When you have spent your all upon mere living, what have you left to live on?” There had been something of this idea in her protest to her employer, and he met her frankly with the assurance that, if she found it impossible to live on her wages, it would give him pleasure to introduce her to a “gentleman friend.” Other employments which were open to her were no better in point of wages; some of them were not so good, but they were all alike in offering relief by the way suggested at the department store.

“I’m not what you’d call a ‘good girl,’” she said, “only, you know, I’d so much rather die than do that.”

And the revulsion of the child’s nature against what to her was this infinite terror led her to tell me of her bringing up. Her memory did not go back to the beginning of her stay in a convent near Dublin, where her parents placed her to be taught. Life had begun for her in the peaceful routine of the sisterhood. All her deepest impressions were got there, and, when as a child of twelve, she came out to emigrate with her people to America, she was instantly in a new world on leaving the convent walls. It had been an almost overwhelming discovery to her to find that the standards of goodness and purity which prevailed within were apparently almost unknown outside the convent. It staggered her intelligence as a child, and, during a long experience of earning her living as a girl, she had slowly constructed a philosophy of life which was drawn from the facts of hard struggle with a world which seemed bent upon compassing her ruin.

She spoke reverently of the teachings of the sisters, and of the influence of their devoted work, “But you know,” she added, “I cannot believe any longer that only those are Christians who are members of the Catholic Church, and that all others will be lost. The world would be too horrible, if that were true. To be a Christian must be simply to follow Christ.”

It was from this revery that we were roused by the loud calling of her name. I watched her walk to the bar and stand there with perfect composure, while the clerk read the indictment, and the witnesses were mechanically sworn, and the girl was heard, and the magistrate gave his verdict.

“Minnie,” he said, in closing, “I told you, when you were here last, that the next time you came up, you should go to the Bridewell, and now to the Bridewell you shall go. Minnie, why can’t a smart girl like you be decent?”

Her profile was toward me, and I saw a faint smile play for a moment on the clear lines of her face.

“Your honor,” she replied, “it is a little late now, but when I began to earn my living I wanted nothing so much as the chance to be decent.”

Meanwhile, two reporters were quickly sketching her where she stood—a singularly well-poised figure—while others were noting the salient facts of the case; for it was a good “story,” having already attracted attention. With wide notoriety as a thief, she went to prison that day, and, when she came out, a not too hospitable world was the more on its guard against her. An officer accompanied her from the room, but she did not forget to nod to me and smile as she passed out.

Engrossed as I had been in Minnie, I had not noticed the coming of the mechanic and the girl whose case had drawn me there. I saw them now when I looked around. The sight of the girl was perplexing at first, for she sat with another woman at the end of a neighboring form, and they looked so much alike that I could not distinguish the one who was there on trial. Crossing the passage, I asked leave to sit beside them. They drew up at once to make room for me, and I saw then that, the girl next me was the prisoner. The other was a twin sister, as she frankly told me, and the resemblance fully sustained her. I explained that I had come to the station-house because I happened to see the affair of a few nights before, and was anxious to find what course it would take in court. The girl agreed with me that the mechanic was in no way to blame.

“He never know’d that it was an officer that was draggin’ me down the steps, and out into the street. I never know’d it neither till I see his star under his coat. I thought he was crazy, and was goin’ to kill me like ‘Jack the Ripper.’” She was a girl in age, and obviously one of the most helpless of her order.

There is a common impression that such women are attracted to their ruin by vanity and a love of dress. You lose that idea among the wrecks who walk the city streets at night. Anything to flatter their vanity or to gratify their taste is the least likely of all possible experiences to most of them. It is a matter of keeping soul and body together. Some are dexterous pick-pockets, who make large hauls at times—not always, however, for themselves; most are ill-fed, ill-dressed slaves, who, when their tributes are paid, are penniless. Any degree of viciousness may be found among them, and you may find as well a high degree of the innocence of the unmoral, the sense of morality completely lost in the instinct of self-preservation.

The girl beside me was like fragile porcelain, her thin lips and nostrils and delicate skin all marred by a pasty, white unwholesomeness. There was a hectic flush in her sister’s face and her eyes were ablaze with disease. We were talking about the case and drifted naturally into further talk about themselves. They were orphans and had long supported themselves by working in a tobacco factory, but there their health had failed, and when they were well enough to work again, they found employment in a laundry. To supplement the “sweating” wages, they had taken to street-walking, and then their end was near. But they spoke as frankly of this last as a “business” as of the earlier occupations, and you saw that, to their thinking, it was only a degree more complete a sale of soul and body.

“But business is poor,” the ill sister was saying, presently, “and I ain’t very well, which I wouldn’t mind, but there’s my baby, and, if anything happens to me, who’s goin’ to take care of him? You don’t think I’ve got consumption, do you?” And she turned upon me a face with the cheeks sunk to the bone and the eyes dilating with the fire which was burning out her life.

When our case came up, it went through without a hitch. The officer told his story with a pompousness that was due to wounded pride and he dwelt over-much upon his efforts to make his assailant understand from the first that he himself was a member of the force. The girl was simplicity and frankness itself; not an effort to conceal her character, but a straightforwardness about the officer’s brutal roughness which threw it into strong relief. But the young mechanic was the best. He was new to courts as he abundantly proved, and when his turn came to testify, he stood licking his dry lips like one with stage-fright. Speech came haltingly from him at the first, while his face flushed, but the sense of injustice urged him on to a perfectly clear statement of how, while “doing the town,” he had seen this girl ill-treated and had struck the man without knowing that he was an officer.

I knew that all was well, for I saw a smile pass vaguely now and then over the magistrate’s face, and when he spoke, the girl was dismissed with a fine and the young mechanic with a friendly warning against “doing the town,” while the officer was held up in open court for reproof and told that, if he knew no better how to handle his prisoners, he was ignorant of the first principles of the special service to which he had been assigned.

It is only a few steps from the station-house to the heart of the business section of the city. I passed through it now, as I often did, for the sake of the feeling that it gives one of the reach and strength of the industrial forces which are centred there. Here is no sense of failure or of loss, but of energy and skill trained to high efficiency in the co-operation of productive powers. Men are there producing for all mankind, and in spite of the present waste of human life, I cannot doubt that, with the problems of production so widely solved, the genius of the race is turning surely to the subtler questions of a fairer distribution.

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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).